Apr 17, 2008

Many talking the sustainability talk

By Bil Paul

We're daily bombarded with the term "sustainability." An upbeat mailer sent out by the people who want to replace Bay Meadows racetrack with housing and commercial units uses the word no less than six times on its front page. Gary Erickson, CEO of the East Bay's Clif Bar company, says, "We think in terms of sustaining our business."

A headline in a business publication advises, "Develop a sustainable competitive advantage" and a Toyota ad talks about its concept of "sustainable mobility" (at least Toyota put its money where its mouth is by developing the Prius). Scientific American magazine asks if economic growth in Africa will be sustainable, while Whole Foods stores offer the credo: "Maintaining sustainability through change."

San Carlos Vice Mayor Bob Grassilli called an expansion of the Shoreway Environmental (recycling) Center in his town "world-class ... with an outstanding commitment to sustainability."

Surfing the Web for other local manifestations of sustainability, I happened upon an outfit called Sustainable San Mateo County (SSMC), which has been around for 16 years. I called its executive director, Tyler Hammer, wondering if he'd be the sort to get defensive if I asked penetrating questions. Actually, he was quite the opposite.

In fact, he agreed that sustainability "has become the buzzword of the last several years. ... Almost any corporation out there is going to have a section of their Web site looking at what they're doing toward sustainability. ... A lot of people are using sustainability for their own agenda."

He mentioned "greenwashing," as something similar, where companies apply green and environmental concepts toward whatever their goals and purposes might be. "They're smart; they know they can use that towards their own marketing advantages," Hammer said. In a word, rather than wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes, they wrap themselves in a green flag. It's tokenism, and Chevron is currently doing it in TV ads.

It reminds me of the 1960s, when some young Americans were rife with talk about revolution (reference the Beetles' song of the same name) and companies co-opted the concept by offering "revolutionary" products.

Overuse of the word sustainability is "one of the things we're struggling with," admits the SSMC's Hammer.

But rather than be totally negative about the concept of sustainability, look at it in a pure form. The term was first used by the Brundtland Commission (a United Nations-created entity) in 1983. The commission defined sustainability as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This is an entirely simple and reasonable concept (I would hope that "future generations" also applies to current species of plants and other animals).

However, sustainability departs from its earlier ecological and environmental roots (going all the way back to John Muir) by additionally encompassing three E's:

- Environmental health

- Economic vitality

- Social equality

Earlier concepts such as "Spaceship Earth" had hinted at this new holistic concept by recognizing that major sectors of civilization - not only those active in the green concepts - would have to join forces to survive with limited resources through the upcoming millennia. The opposite effect would happen when people only pursued very narrow interests such as extracting as much oil from the Earth as possible to gain as much profit as possible as soon as possible; or gaining profits from selling military supplies for the latest war.

Environmentalists realized they needed to partner with the business world and the movement toward reducing the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Even the Sierra Club ventured into the area of endorsing certain housing developments for their lowered impact upon the environment, which is quite a switch for them.

Going back to our local group, Sustainable San Mateo County, one of the ideas which guided people when it was founded, according to Hammer, was "Think globally, act locally." And that's what they've done. Their chief activity is an annual report of vital indicators of how well the county's doing, within the boundaries of the Three E's and the "meet future generations' needs" idea.

Their 2008 effort was just released and their county "sustainability indicators" cover everything from A (agriculture and air quality) to W (water quality). To read the full 80-page document, visit www.sustainablesanmateo.org. They also list how well individual cities are doing.

This year, SSMC raised a warning flag about our drinking water supply, questioning whether our current water supply, mostly courtesy of the San Francisco water department and its Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Sierra Nevada, will continue to meet our water needs as our population and number of businesses increase. The SSMC lauds Redwood City for its conservation efforts but mentions that overall water usage in San Mateo County amounts to 87.1 gallons per person per day (of course, some of that is used by businesses). It would seem that in the future, we might have to look at using point-of-use water heaters (so we don't waste so much water waiting for hot water to arrive at faucets) and forgoing daily showers and daily automatic lawn watering.

It seems that local cities have taken the lead in looking at sustainability in its true sense - by not looking at the environmental component only. At the state and federal levels, however, it would seem that most legislators want to compartmentalize the concept of sustainability and make it just one room of a house of 15 rooms. I don't think many legislators realize that sustainability is an all-encompassing movement that's attracting some of the same passion religions do, and that its precepts will lay the groundwork for future planning and legislation, just as our local cities adopt 15-year general plans that more and more involve sustainability in every aspect.

I'd like to point at certain anti-sustainability phenomena:

- Endless and uncontrolled population growth.

- Governments solving current financial problems by selling bonds that future generations have to pay off.

- Wars (unproductive and unbelievably expensive in human, environmental and financial terms).

Note: Earth Day is next Tuesday, April 22.



Bil Paul's column appears Thursdays in the Daily News. Reach him at natural_born_writer@yahoo.com.